A Confession Regarding the Jewish Question

So, after all, we have arrived again in a situation where we must confess. We younger ones had felt entitled to the hope that we would gradually succeed in living integrated into the “nation of Kant”; that the existing differences would be progressively smoothed out, first with the help of a moral politics, pursued as a matter of principle, and by way of historical reflection incumbent on each individual; that over time it would be possible to allow the patriotic love in us to express itself unselfconsciously, and likewise the feeling of pride in being able to participate on an equal footing in the tasks of the nation. This sense of trust was destroyed in us; the old bleak uneasiness is being reawakened. [ . . . ]

In the last few days, [Heinrich von] Treitschke refined his Jewish Question by pointing out to us the difference between Religion and Denomination, by depicting the world-historical struggles of the denominations as “domestic quarrels,” by calling Judaism “the national religion of a tribe originally alien to us,” and thus privileging categorically the messianic-humanistic notion of a “purer form of Christianity” over Israelite monotheism, denying that the latter can be amalgamated into that “purer form.”¹ [ . . . ]

Jewish monotheism is characterized by two concepts: the spirituality of God and the messianic promise. The former concerns the nature of God, the latter the historical task, the ethical ideal of mankind. The two grow out of each other. [ . . . ]

Men of religious education—and this does not exclude those with eighteenth-century nationalist conviction—who are thinking about these matters, will have to acknowledge: we Jews share a religious commonality with Christianity. Even Christians of positive faith, who accept the distinction between religion and denomination in its full dogmatic content, have, partly, so much religious feeling and, accordingly, tolerance, and, partly, such a strong attachment to the Old Testament that they do not exclude us from the religious commonality with them. [ . . . ]

Just as the [general] history of Jewish monotheism with its dogma of One God already delineates the inner development of the Protestant mode, so did the German Jews, in particular, in the evolution of their religious movements quite identifiably follow the Protestant form of religious culture. It was only while living among Germans that the Jewish tribe developed—for the first time since the blossoming of Jewish intellect during the Arab-Spanish period—a universal cultural life. [ . . . ]

When we respond calmly and honestly to racial sentiments, we will have to admit that we accept them ourselves. I claim confidently: all of us wish we had German, Germanic features; as it is, we evidence only their climatic side effects, as even the northern and the southern German Jew are visibly different from one another. Concerning this issue we can simply say: Be patient, and—I don’t have to know for how many years or centuries no wiser man will have to arrive to determine this process. [ . . . ]

It must be the principal consideration, and more than that, it must become the holiest desire that we attune ourselves closely to the natural tone, in all its variant melodies, of the people with whom we want to fuse. Only temporarily may we be given credit for our idiosyncrasies; but we must continue to demonstrate our effort to rid ourselves of them. No sentimental pretext must be invoked to tolerate as an innocent private indulgence—except as an act of defense—that we praise our tribe as such, as a lasting idiosyncratic result of our living religion. A national double-identity is not only unethical, it is impossible. Only a period of transition, during which even the best Jew is always only a Jew, can foster the growth of such a misshapen plant. [ . . . ]

The Jews have one “permanent task,” which is the preservation of monotheism, until the achievement of that “purer form of Christianity”; this was a separate task, but after that achievement it became the shared task of all monotheisms. I have no interest at all in other heterogeneous developments and I cannot accept that they have a right to asylum. The morality of a people resides in its national unity, or is pressing in that direction. Within a national commonality there can be and may be individual morality. But none that expresses itself substantively in separate religious groups or sects is desirable. [ . . . ]

Thus I have returned to the main point, the elucidation of which, in the given context, seemed to me both appropriate and necessary. Our Israelite religion, in the mode in which it suffuses us today with a living spirit, has already entered into a cultural-historical union with Protestantism; not only did Protestantism discard outright the traditions of the Church in just the same way that we threw off as binding the traditions of the Talmud; but also on a deeper level, regarding spiritual issues of religion, we think and feel in the Protestant mode. For that reason, our religious commonality is in truth the strongest and most effective binding agent in the process of a deep national fusion.